h of which his art was capable, placed it in a
pigeon-hole to be fitted, when the opportunity offered, into an
appropriate corner of his mosaic-work. We can see him at work, for
example, in the passage about Addison and the celebrated concluding
couplet. The epigrams in which his poetry abounds have obviously been
composed in the same fashion, for that 'masterpiece of man,' as South is
made to call it in the 'Dunciad,' is only produced in perfection when
the labour which would have made an ode has been concentrated upon a
couple of lines. There is a celebrated recipe for dressing a lark, if we
remember rightly, in which the lark is placed inside a snipe, and the
snipe in a woodcock, and so on till you come to a turkey, or, if
procurable, to an ostrich; then, the mass having been properly stewed,
the superincumbent envelopes are all thrown away, and the essences of
the whole are supposed to be embodied in the original nucleus. So the
perfect epigram, at which Pope is constantly aiming, should be the
quintessence of a whole volume of reflection. Such literary cookery,
however, implies not only labour, but an unwearied vividness of thought
and feeling. The poet must put his soul into the work as well as his
artistic power. Thus, if we may take Pope's most vigorous expressions as
an indication of his strongest convictions, and check their conclusions
by his personal history and by the general tendency of his writings, we
might succeed in putting together something like a satisfactory
statement of the moral system which he expressed forcibly because he
believed in it sincerely.

Without following the proofs in detail, let us endeavour to give some
statement of the result. What, in fact, did Pope learn by his study of
man, such as it was? What does he tell us about the character of human
beings and their position in the universe which is either original or
marked by the freshness of independent thought? Perhaps the most
characteristic vein of reflection is that which is embodied in the
'Dunciad.' There, at least, we have Pope speaking energetically and
sincerely. He really detests, abjures, and abominates as impious and
heretical, without a trace of mental reservation, the worship of the
great goddess Dulness. The 'Dunciad' does not show the quality in which
Pope most excels, that which makes his best satires resemble the
quintessence of the most brilliant thought of his most brilliant
contemporaries. But it has more energy a